Calling vidders and academics

[rivkat]

So, rather than finishing up my edits or preparing materials for Vividcon (by the way – any intellectual property-type questions vidders want answered? Let me know here and I’ll be sure to work your questions into my presentation) – I’ve been doing more reading, specifically at Henry Jenkins’ website. He has a bunch of interesting stuff up, from Lassie to Mortal Kombat. There’s a long dialogue between him and Matt Hills, who wrote Fan Cultures, that is just wonderful, with too much thoughtful stuff to summarize, though my favorite bits are about the change in cultural production over the past few decades to anticipate, incorporate and respond to fans. If you’re at all interested in theorizing fandom, read it.

What this exchange really got me thinking about was Jenkins’ account of the increasing respectability among academics of being a fan as well as of writing about fans. To a certain extent, this is clearly true; if anything, now one has to defend looking down on fans rather than identifying with them. But Jenkins’ and Hills’ experience is not mine, for a specific (perhaps gendered) reason: As far as I know, though both men are explicit in their academic work that they are fans, they do not produce fiction, art or vids. “Coming out” for them is therefore a lot less fraught. For me, the danger is far more related to my students than my colleagues, most of whom are likely to see my fannish endeavors as bizarre but not academically disqualifying. With students, though, wearing Spock ears really has nothing on the way I’m exposed. Sure, if you actually read Jenkins’ work, you’ll know he’s read a bunch of slash, but, flippantly, it seems to me that the only thing surprising about finding a man reading “porn” is that he’s reading it. My students can easily access what they might well assume are my sexual fantasies – or, at a minimum, what I think might be arousing to readers. Yes, I do feel vulnerable, and it isn’t something I’d ever bring up with students, though I haven’t taken heroic measures to separate my identities and I understand I’ve been outed to some of them.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear what other fan writers/artists/vidders who are also academics have to say about what your academic colleagues know about your fannish commitments.

Comments

Re: Fancademics

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I hear your complaint, and I find I behave the same way towards colleagues and students. I use a bunch of pop culture examples in class, because they often work well, and I wrote an exam based on less-well-known SV characters, to which a couple of students made explicit reference in their answers. But I don't really want them to put the pieces together. I think you've got it exactly right about controlling others' interpretations.

I think we are at a specially fraught intersection of sex and otherwise-devalued cultural activity. As Jenkins points out, people like Pat Califia have done a lot to make discussion of one's own sexual preferences more acceptable in at least certain parts of the academy, by defending things like BDSM on theoretical grounds while also appealing to personal experience. Fandom is different, because while we're often saying something about our own sex lives (e.g., pretty boys overwhelmed by their fatal passion for one another get me hot), the way we make that statement is through stories, which implicitly make the claim "and you should get hot from this too." (I'm not saying that we mean to make this claim, only that I hypothesize that this perception accounts for some of the discomfort non-fen feel.) In another analogy to homophobia, perhaps some of the unease generated by our perversity is the risk that we will contaminate/seduce our once-innocent audiences.